‘Tis the season for cyber-attacks: Are you prepared?

Written on
Nov 16, 2017

By Jason Guyler and David Reedy, consultants for CyberRisk Management

Holidays are a particularly busy time, as people are trying to manage their jobs and businesses along with overloaded social agendas. With all the excitement and stress of the holiday season, the risks associated with cyber threats are easily overlooked. Probably for the same reasons, this also is a time when cyber criminals seem to attack most often.

As a consumer shopping online or in-person, it is important that you remain diligent to protect your personal information. You need to make sound decisions about how you share your personal information when shopping online (consider using PayPal) and at a retailer. A few tips:

Value personal data over flashy offers - do not complete surveys for small gifts.

Check your statements often and report any suspicious changes.

Be careful of offers that look too good to be true (they likely are).

If you work for a retailer that accepts credit cards, there are things you need to make sure your company is doing to protect customers’ personal information, such as:

Training staff about potential security risks.

Improving monitoring and detection capabilities.

Sharing threat data.

Implementing a security response plan and having a backup plan.

When the holiday season is over, you might assume you can let your guard down, but tax preparers face the next round of cybercrime. Crooks focus on stealing clients’ data and identities, and tax refund fraud is a growing issue that can be the result of a data breach, which can be devastating for a firm’s reputation. The same steps for preventing such an attack apply.

CyberRisk Management specializes in helping organizations and their technical staff implement a cost-effective cyber risk management program that address these requirements based on NIST guidelines. CyberRisk Management also provides cyber awareness training programs to help prepare your staff for phishing attacks. If you have questions or want to learn more, contact Jason and David at info@cyber-riskmgt.com to learn more about implementing a cyber risk management program.